While home for break I find myself becoming a lot closer with my Nintendo DS since my consoles are a hundred miles away and locked in a closet. Since it’s been out since 2004, I’ll assume most people reading this have likely played a DS once or twice. If you haven’t, the selling point of the device is the fact that it has two screens. The bottom screen is a touch pad. That’s the most basic of basic explanations, but I find the best way to learn about a gaming system is to actually try it out yourself.

The touch screen makes for some interesting game ideas. But how much is too much? When does innovation turn into, ’stop, just stop, seriously’? After sitting down and thinking about the DS games I’ve played over the last few years, I was able to piece together what I think about the DS and some of its games.

Okay, for myself, I have to start with Phoenix Wright. I just have to. Don’t argue with me. Phoenix Wright is a DS version of one of those old-school choose your own adventure books. You play as a defense attorney (I guess prosecution would have been too exciting) and in the first three games that would be Phoenix Wright. A mostly clueless dude who relies on the spirit (Yeah, spirit. She’s dead) of his former boss to get him through a lot of cases.

In this case (har har pun) the touch screen is mainly used to cycle through menu screens with profiles, evidence, etc. When you’re in court and you throw down some awesome evidence, Phoenix does his trademark “OBJECTION!!” yell. You also use the screen to sift through the witness testimony to find flaws. During the investigation portions of the game, the touch screen is used to search around crime scenes while Maya Fey makes some really annoying quips about what you find.

I love this game, not going to lie here. The cases normally start with some campy horror movie-esq scene that shows you some of the murder. After that you take the reigns and try to find out what really happened. The touch screen factors in just enough, but not too much.

Now the game that has had so many of my friends addicted for the last couple of months. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. First of all, it’s a Zelda game. Everyone knows talking bad about a Zelda game is going to get you kidnapped by the Nintendo mafia and killed in a cold, dark alley somewhere. The game has received overwhelming positive reviews.

It’s a direct sequel to Windwaker, which means the graphics are hideous. You play as bobblehead Link and sail a lot. That’s pretty much the whole game. I kid, I kid. There’s sort of a plot too.

I love the rest of the Zelda series. I could play Link’s Awakening over and over (and have). But this game really wasn’t for me. I’ll admit that my dislike of the graphics made me wary of it at first, so I probably went into it biased. But hey, graphics aren’t everything.

Phantom Hourglass is pretty much all touch screen. The buttons on the DS don’t do much except pull the map down, which you can do via the touch screen anyway. Where ever you point the stylus, Link goes. Tap an enemy, he slashes with his sword. Draw patterns to send your boomerang flying. Etc. Etc. Etcetera. At first I had fun with it, especially the boomerang. Trying to roll into the trees was a little agitating, but hey. You gotta work for that 100 rupees!

After a while, specifically towards the later action parts, I found the constant use of the touch screen really tedious. To me, it didn’t seem very precise. Getting Link to move was kind of laggy and if you move the stylus in the wrong direction, BAM, off the cliff you go. I also wasn’t fond of the constant need to tap the icons to change the item you were using. (You have to tap it on the menu to get it in a box in the upper left corner, then tap on that box to be able to use it, then tap the box again to put it away so you can use your sword again) I much prefer the old two button system and use of the start screen.

The game is definitely a fun challenge, I will say that. But I just didn’t really have anything invested in the characters or story, so I didn’t have much of a reason to press on through said challenge. I rarely played it for more than an hour or two at a time before getting bored. Especially since I had a plethora of other DS titles sitting less than two feet away from me.

When I think of the Lunar series, I smile. It sticks out in my memory due to its gratuitous use of cut-scenes, mediocre voice acting, and general comedy. The plots of the games have a special place in my heart, because who doesn’t love a sappy romance story every once in a while? Well, actually, don’t answer that.

I bought Lunar: Dragon Song for the DS in the hopes of being wowed by another great Lunar game. My first tipoff should have been that the original translators for Lunar, Working Designs, is defunct, leaving Ubisoft to localize and translate the game. Engrish and typos abound. Who needs dry wit and humor when you can have hilariously awkward sentences instead?

The game was a huge letdown to me. After playing the first two Lunar games and taking note that the dragons had the same general design in both games, Dragon Song used completely different dragons. The black dragon was a turtle thing. Granted, the game takes place 1000 years before The Silver Star Story, but Quark and Nall were two generations of white dragons and they looked exactly the same. Plus, how many times has Althena died and claimed that Lunar doesn’t need a Goddess? I’m well aware of how Silver Star Story ended, and yet, she dies in Dragon Song 1000 years earlier and assures the main character that Lunar no longer needs a Goddess or dragonmasters. Um. Okay? I guess she just felt like saying that and continuously reincarnating for a thousand years, then finally stopping.

The game uses both screens in unison during fight scenes. The bottom half of enemies are shown on the touch screen along with your menu, and the top screen has the top halves of the enemies along with flying enemies and the sky. Does it sound as awkward as it really is? I hope so. The gameplay isn’t anything special. Fight, item, run. Yep. That’s about it. This game would be the ’stop, just stop, seriously’ that I referred to in my opening.

Oh, another pet peeve before I move on. One of the designers had a great idea to make the game more challenging. And by great, I mean terrible. Every time your characters run, they lose HP. You can only run until they reach 1/3rd of their HP, then they autowalk everywhere. I can’t describe how much of a thrill it is to have to walk through every town and dungeon. Look out enemies! I’m slowly coming towards you! Hope you don’t see me coming! Yeah! Power walking, woo!

Last but certainly not least, I’m going to talk about Trauma Center. This game freaks me the Hell out, and I’ll try to explain why later. However, it’s still incredibly addictive and fun and utilizes the DS’s touch screen in a way I, personally, find to be perfect.

If the name wasn’t enough of a hint, in this game you play a surgeon. The top screen of the DS is only for conversations and keeping track of your time limit and score, which means you barely have to pay any attention to it at all. Which is nice, because the nurses operating with you have a tendency to make strange faces when they scream at you. What do you mean I shouldn’t use the forceps on the heart? Oh snap, flat line.

The touch screen is where all the action takes place. It’s where you pick your tool, monitor the patient’s heart rate (if they flat line and die, game over!) and generally do the operation itself. Its realism is obviously not on par with real life surgery, thank God, but you are going to need common sense to get things done. You can’t laser glass shards out of someone’s liver. You have to pluck them out and stitch up the wounds. At first the chapters are relatively easy. Hey Doctor Stiles, we need you to remove glass that inexplicably got stuck in this guy’s spleen! But later when GUILT hits the scene, the game turns maddening. I mean, I’m talking chuck your DS across the room hard. And yet, it’s still strangely addicting and fun.

Playing this game is an interesting experience for me, being that I’m inherently squeamish and terrified of hospitals. That aside, something about this game makes me shudder. I think, honestly, it’s because of GUILT. The game takes place in a not too distant future and some backwards paranoid part of my brain actually thinks something like GUILT could happen. Logically? Duh, it’s just a game. Backswards brain? But what if it HAPPENS!! Yes. Yes I am crazy.

Now I imagine people who haven’t played the game are saying to themselves, “But Gloria, what is GUILT?” Well, the plot of trauma center is that it takes place in the future during a time when most viruses and diseases have cures. Delphi, a medical terrorist organization, begins infecting people with GUILT viruses and parasites. GUILT is next to impossible to cure and different strains do different things. Kyriaki is like a little bug that goes into your organs and cuts them up from the inside. Pempti freaks me out a lot too, since it makes your lungs fill with fluid while cutting them up. I have to admit, it squicks me out. But still, it’s just a game.

So in the end, take from this article what you will. I actually never leave home without my DS and a select bunch of games, ranging from Harvest Moon to the GBA versions of the older Mario games. Overall it’s a great hand-held system with a variety of interesting old, new and soon to be released games. In summation, DS goooooooooooooood .

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Video Games, Reviews, Nintendo DS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.